Over the last year, law enforcement officials around the world have been pressing hard on the notion that without a magical "backdoor" to access the content of any and all encrypted communications by ordinary people, they’ll be totally incapable of fulfilling their duties to investigate crime and protect the public. EFF and many others have pushed back—including launching a petition with our friends to SaveCrypto, which this week reached 100,000 signatures, forcing a response from President Obama.

Crack open a Club-Mate and raise a glass to strong crypto. There’s reason to celebrate.

Today, the 100,000th person signed our petition calling on President Obama to reject compelled backdoors in our communications.

The campaign, hosted at SaveCrypto.org, uses the White House's We the People API to feed signatures into a petition hosted on Obama’s preferred petition platform. The campaign was the work of over 40 nonprofits and tech companies, including Access Now, Fight for the Future, OpenMedia, Mozilla, Sum of Us, Twitter, Google, and DropBox. President Obama has promised to respond to any petition that gets 100,000 signatures within 30 days.

Senators Grassley and Leahy, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Committee on the Judiciary, have published a letter to the Copyright Office asking it to analyze the impact of copyright law on “software-enabled devices” (such as cars, phones, drones, appliances, and many more products with embedded computer systems). This issue is crucial because technology and the law have evolved in a way that no one could have intended when Congress wrote the present copyright laws, and that evolution has restricted customers’ freedoms to repair, understand, and improve on the devices they buy.

In light of this year's 40th anniversary of the Church Committee—legendary for exposing illegal mass domestic government surveillance during the 1960s and 1970s—the Wayne State University School of Law brought former Church Committee members together in Washington, D.C. to discuss how Congress can effectively oversee classified programs. The all-day event saw numerous experts and two key former Church Committee staffers—Fritz Swartz and Loch Johnson—unanimously call on Congress to reassert its oversight authority over intelligence programs.